"I cannot believe this,” Fara said. “Here I am trying to do science, and I have to deal with a drug dealer named Little Boozy who is cooking the bodies of aliens to make hallucinogens for the local teenagers. Not to mention Reptilian conspiracy theorists."
"Steeping, more like. I don't think he really cooks them, except for that first time.” Ken let pass her remark about Vera. No way was he having that conversation ... although it did occur to him to wonder where Vera had gotten to. She might not be the type to climb over chains, but she also wasn't the type to go easily when she thought she was on the trail of galactic secrets. Which was all the time.
"Well, he's innovative, Little Boozy, isn't he?” Fara forced herself to take a bite of the salad. “Listen, if we can really communicate with them, I mean directly, without using the gravimeter, how are we supposed to explain what he's doing?"
"I wondered about that myself,” Ken said. “Maybe when we take them up on their invitation, we can ask."
* * * *
At slightly after two o'clock in the morning, butterflies in his stomach, Ken was watching Fara tinker with her Izod gravity gizmo out in the woods where they'd seen the lizard-men. So, he was thinking. Guess we're going to do it. “You never did tell me what you said to them,” he said.
She wasn't listening. “Hmm?"
"When you were trying to talk to them,” Ken prompted. “What did you say?"
"Oh, yeah. I just sent a test message. Quick brown fox type of thing."
"Okay, but was it actual words, or are you saying it that way because you don't think I'll understand what you really did?"
Fara stood and turned to him. “Ken. I'm really not always trying to be patronizing. Okay?"
"Fine,” he said. “So was it actual words?"
She sighed. “Yes. Kind of. I made a guess at how their messages might be structured, and sent something back with a similar structure. For all I know, it came across as a haiku."
"That's all you needed to say, Professor."
"You are an exasperating man,” Fara said, and went back to her tinkering. Ken stood feeling awkward until she was done. Then it was Go Time. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the bottle he'd bought from Travis.
"Are just the two of us going to be enough?” he asked her.
"How should I know?"
Ken opened the bottle, which had once held maple syrup and now held about two inches of lizard-man tea. “Here's mud in your eye,” he said, and drank. He held it out to Fara, and she killed off what was left.
"Do we dance now?” she asked.
"How should I know?"
Fara gave him a look and tapped something into the keyboard attached to the gravimeter. “Okay,” she said. “Take us to your leaders."
A tremor crept up Ken's left leg. He looked down at it and watched as his foot started to tap. “Hoo boy,” he said. “Stuff works fast.” An old Saturday Night Live sketch with Steve Martin ran through his head. The lizard-man tea scoured its way through his brain, and he started to hear chirps and whistles, like whalesong or R2D2. He caught Fara's eye, and then caught her hand, and just like that they were pogoing. Her eyes shone in the dark, and Ken wanted to sing but didn't know the words. His mouth came open anyway, and sound came out, and for a second the sound blinded him and he felt like he was sensing something, physically sensing something, that wasn't coming via taste/touch/smell/sound/sight. Someone took his other hand, and Ken tried to look at who it was, but he couldn't make his eyes work—a lizard-man? Would they dance together? The hand felt bigger than that, but there was no trusting sensation at this point. A third voice joined in, and deep inside the hallucinatory fog shrouding Ken's brain, realization sparked: Vera of the Forked Tongue. Oh shit, he thought. She found us. Still he couldn't make his eyes work, and then he figured out the trick. They were closed, that was it, and all he had to do was open them, and that's when he saw not just Vera of the Forked Tongue but Little Boozy Boswell, the four of them pogoing in a ring, like they were dancing around an interdimensional maypole. The music filled him with longing, and Ken understood that as they sang, he and Fara and Little Boozy and Vera were all saying yes.
I've been had, Ken thought. Vera and Little Boozy had it all figured out, and now that I've got my eyes open I'm stuck watching the two of them jump up and down. He tried to look at Fara instead, but found that he could no longer control his head. The world swirled, and Ken felt his body start to come apart. He looked around, but it took him a long time to turn his head as time started to elongate; then in a rush the bark fell off all of the trees and their leaves turned into embers flitting up away from the fire burning in the center of the circle made by their four bodies. The music was too loud to hear, and they were still saying yes.
There was a crackling sound inside Ken's head, akin to what he'd heard the last time he'd yawned while he had a sinus infection. The four of them, hand in hand in hand in hand, jumped up and came down, jumped up and came down. Jumped up.
* * * *
The first thing that happened in the lizard-men's dimension, or universe or whatever it was, was that Ken's ears popped. Then he looked around, and what he saw convinced him that God, if there was such a being, was more of a prankster than anyone had guessed.
He dropped Vera's hand but held onto Fara's, and she let him. “Unbelievable,” she said.
It was hot and sunny, the sun brighter and whiter than back home. There was something like grass under Ken's feet, and things like trees growing around them, and water in a pond off to their left. It must have been autumn, because most of the leaves had fallen off the trees, and through their naked branches Ken could see the outlines of structures. He knew what they were for because he'd spent the last thirty-three years in one.
"A tourist trap,” he said.
On the side of one of the buildings was a colorful banner, and a lizard-man sat on a stool taking tickets from a lizard-man family. A little farther away was some kind of gaming area; maybe lizard-men hadn't discovered minigolf yet, but they had something like it. Ken wondered what it was, and had the thought that he might just make his fortune if he could figure it out and bring it back to Earth. play the game the aliens play!!! What a banner that would make out on US-12.
Everything was at lizard-man scale, and Ken felt unwieldy, as if he might break something the minute he moved. A tiny silver airplane flew overhead. As he worked through the logic of what he was seeing, Ken got a sudden chill. Leaning his head close to Fara's, he said, “You think they have a shed like mine?"
She looked at him. “I don't know,” she said. “Has anyone ever come through before?"
"Maybe it's been just the one way,” he said. “Hell, maybe it's like extreme tourism. Experience the dangers of another dimension, as soon as you sign this liability waiver."
Fara laughed. “Litigious aliens,” she said.
Her equanimity amazed him, and he was about to tell her so, but just then a shriek of exaltation escaped Vera of the Forked Tongue. “Glory be!” she screamed, and fell to her knees. What a time this must be for her, Ken thought. Turns out that after all this time of everyone telling her she was nuts, me included, she was onto something. Little Boozy's reaction was a bit different. He took one look around, turned to Ken, and said, “We need to get the hell out of here."
When Ken saw what Boozy had seen, he thought that Boozy was exactly right. A group of lizard-men, carrying what appeared to be weapons, came trooping out of the woods in their direction.
"You and your conservation of form,” Ken said to Fara. “Your grammar of phylogeny."
"I didn't invent it,” she said.
"Wonder if they're going to steep us,” Ken said. Little Boozy took off running, and one of the lizard-men raised its weapon and shot him. He sprawled on the grass, rolled over onto his back, and started foaming at the mouth. A small black dart stuck out of the side of his neck.
"Uh oh,” Ken said. He was sweating, and could already feel the beginnings of a sunburn on the bac
k of his neck. Vera was still on her knees, and had begun to babble in some language Ken didn't recognize. Maybe it came from one of her books on how to talk to Reptilians. The group of lizard-men stopped about ten feet from the three humans and fanned out into a semicircle.
"So, listen,” Ken said to Fara, keeping his voice low. “You think we're here because of your gravity doodad or because of the tea?"
She shrugged. “I'm not going to speculate on metaphysics. My guess is the Lacoste did it."
"So we can go back?"
"I don't know,” she said. “We haven't tried."
Vera of the Forked Tongue switched to English. “I am one of you,” she said to the lizard-men, adding an elaborate pantomime that looked to Ken like some kind of interpretive dance. “One of you, don't you understand? I just can't change back."
One of the lizard-men came up to Ken. It stood about waist-high to him, but nothing about its posture indicated a trace of wariness. Looking back and forth between him and Fara, it made some kind of decision. It coughed and said, “Took you long enough."
I'll be damned, Ken thought. He kept his mouth shut, though, because the lizard-man was talking to Fara.
"It's not every day you invent a way to manipulate gravity to travel to another brane,” Fara said, a trifle defensively. Ken at first heard her last word as brain, and spent some time wondering if she was saying they were just hallucinating the whole thing before he got himself back on track. “Have you been watching me?” she asked.
The lizard-man nodded. Then it looked at Ken and said, “The chessboard—is that what you call it, chessboard?"
Ken's throat was too dry for him to speak, so he nodded.
"Funny,” the lizard-man said. Its inflection was so flat that he couldn't tell if it was joking.
"How did you learn English?” Fara asked it.
"Observation."
Ken swallowed three or four times, trying to find his voice. “Do you ... what is this?” he asked. “Do you run tours or something?"
The lizard-man ignored him. It was looking over at Little Boozy, who was starting to shake off the effects of whatever they'd darted him with. “His jars are not funny,” it said.
Boozy, Ken thought, you're a walking dead man.
"I never did that,” he said.
Again the lizard-man ignored what he'd said. It was looking at Vera, who, still on her knees, had approached it. “I am one of you,” she said. The lizard-man looked up at Fara.
"Can you explain this?” it asked.
Fara inclined her head toward Ken. “He can."
The lizard-man looked at Ken, and he said, “Um. Well, she ... there's people who believe that people like you have been coming to Earth for a long time. And you can change shapes and look like our people, humans. She believes that, and she thinks she's one of you who can't change her shape back."
The lizard-man kept its gaze on Ken. It didn't say anything.
"I know,” he said. “It sounds crazy to me, too."
Some kind of cheer, a storm of whistles and chirps, rose up from the gaming area. “What is that game, anyway?” Ken asked.
The lizard-man walked away. Vera shuffled after it on her knees, still professing her true Reptilian form. “Now might be a good time to see if we can get back,” Ken said to Fara.
"Yeah,” she said. “I have data to get back to."
Data, Ken thought.
The lizard-man returned. “There is some difficulty,” it said, and pointed at Little Boozy. “That one has committed crimes."
"That's what I always told him,” Ken said.
"He will stay here,” the lizard-man said.
There was a silence. Ken imagined Little Boozy trussed up on a lizard-man table with an apple in his mouth. Man, he thought. I should do something. Boozy's a bastard, but he doesn't deserve to be eaten.
"Business has been slow,” the lizard-man said.
Ken opened his mouth, shut it again, opened it again. “You're going to exhibit him?"
"And this one,” the lizard-man said, pointing at Vera, who had gone back to speaking in tongues. “You will exchange the two of them for going home."
"Well, listen,” Ken said. “You get two of us, man, you're going to triple your receipts in no time. How about some kind of exchange, you know? I can build something on the side of the barn, you can show us humans what that game is. How about it?” What he really wanted was the game. Real live lizard-men would be way too much trouble; Ken had briefly tried adding a petting zoo to Mystery Hill, but it had ended badly.
"You will exchange the two of them for going home,” the lizard-man repeated.
"Come on, at least tell me about the game,” Ken said.
Fara, who had been staring at him in disbelief during his previous sales pitch, now hauled off and slapped him on the back of the head. “Ken,” she said in a heated whisper, “Vera wants to stay and Boozy's a murderer. Do not negotiate."
"Okay, fine,” he said, spreading his hands. “Fine."
Whereupon Fara turned on her biggest movie-star smile and said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question or two about how you travel? I'm still getting some of the bugs worked out."
The lizard-man just looked at her. So did Ken. Little Boozy had gotten to his feet. He swayed and said, “Man, if I could bottle that, I'd be rich."
To Ken and Fara, the lizard-man said, “It is time for you to go."
"Not even a hint about the game?” Ken said.
The lizard-man unhooked two small steel boxes from its bandolier. It handed one to Ken and one to Fara. “Do not come back again,” it said.
These folks drive a tough bargain, Ken thought. “You really liked the chessboard?” he asked.
"Go,” said the lizard-man. It made a signal to one of its fellows, and just like that, Ken and Fara were standing in the woods behind Mystery Hill. Predawn mist wafted along the surface of the pond, and both of them shivered in the sudden chill. Ken's ears popped again.
The disappearance of Little Boozy Boswell did not go unremarked. Nor did the fact that a 1982 Nissan B10 hatchback belonging to Vera of the Forked Tongue was found parked by Little Boozy's tea shack. Big Boozy was heard to say that his boy had run off with a crazy woman, which was all right with him since that's how he had come to be the father of Little Boozy in the first place. It was damn good, opined Big Boozy, that some families observed their traditions. He was looking forward to his first grandchild. The tea shack mysteriously burned to the ground about two weeks after Little Boozy and Vera vanished. Big Boozy blamed the local kids, and when he couldn't pin the crime on any of them and the insurance company refused to pay up, Ken figured this new grievance would keep the old man alive for another ten years.
Fara spent about six months trying to reverse-engineer the little steel boxes that had made the trip back with them, but it never worked. She stopped by every so often to take measurements and fiddle with the Lacoste, but as time went by, it became clear that the lizard-men had done something to interfere with her progress. She could still read the disturbances in the local gravity, but she couldn't send messages. “Those little bastards,” she fumed.
"Well,” Ken said, “they don't come here anymore.” Which was true; he hadn't seen one since the night he'd gone to another universe. “And they didn't want us to come back anyway. What were you going to do, write a paper about them?"
On her last visit, Ken showed her the display area he'd built on the side of the barn to house his taxidermied lizard-men, with Boris and Bobby right up front. Hell with it, he figured; he had it right from the lizard-man's mouth that they liked the chessboard, and man, did the tourists eat the whole thing up. He sold postcards, T-shirts with lizard-men on them, the works. He'd even gritted his teeth and let Jamie put up a MySpace profile. Plus his minigolf course was in much better shape now that area teenagers were no longer communing with the lizard-men on the seventeenth green.
He told Fara all this while she was sitting in her car, about to leave, and she l
aughed at him. “Ken,” she said, “you're the only sentimental tourist-trap shyster I know. The only one who loves the debunkers and the true believers equally. You were born to this."
Then she drove off, headed for a conference where she was going to present some results on her research into local fluctuations in gravity and their possible implications for the theory of strings, and he figured he'd never hear from her again. A slobberknocker of a girl, Ken thought. She gave him hope.
He turned back to regard his domain. Little kids were running around waving toy lizard-men that he'd just unboxed that morning. Their parents followed waving cameras and brochures. Older kids moved in herds across the minigolf course, taking pictures of each other and shrieking at the results. A recently arrived wacko was conducting some kind of occult experiment on the wavelength of sunlight near the plumb bob. Jamie looked harried at the ticket window; could be he was going to have to hire another sullen adolescent to deal with the swelling number of customers. Pretty good, Ken thought. On the other side, the lizard-men might be making a pile of money off Little Boozy and Vera, but right there and then, he was doing fine off them, too. He considered it a fair deal for everyone.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Coming Attractions
As the days shorten here in the Northern Hemisphere, F&SF plans to bring readers lots of great fiction to brighten the days.
In our February issue, James L. Cambias gives us a charming tale of making a living out among the moons of Saturn. However, that description might be a bit misleading ... but you'll have to wait until next month to read “Balancing Accounts” and see for yourself.
From Saturn to suburbia ... in “Memoirs of the Witch Queen,” Ron Goulart spins out a story of unusual doings in the quiet town of New Beckford, Connecticut. A humble writer named Paul Sanson finds his life turned upside-down when he takes on the job of polishing the memoirs of a local character. Is Easy Street one of the quiet lanes in this little town?
FSF, January 2008 Page 18